At the behest of Chris Murphy (Evangelist for Epic Games and discusser of all things Star Trek) asked me when my next update would be since I'm "killing [him] with anticipation." (Also, if you've not already, go and follow Chris on Twitter @HighlySpammable.)

Over the last 6-7 months, instead of working on updating my own site I've been working as part of the Learning Resources (aka documentation) Team at Epic Games and writing official documentation that includes new content pages or updates to existing ones.

Below is a non-comprehensive list of what I've added in my short time on the team and some of the ideas or areas I have to update sections in the future.

New Pages:
These are new pages that did not exist that were created for a new release feature, as a request from our developers (internal or external), or was part of our backlog that we wanted to address.

Slate Clipping System - waiting for the next publish of docs. Should be soon!

Overview

Clipping for UMG Widgets

A Bunch of Console specific documentation for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch that is available for our Custom Licensees and registered console developers.

Updated/Restructured Pages:
These are pages that needed new information added but doesn't necessitate a completely new page. Often with this, since we improve our documentation Styles and Standards that we want to adhere to for consistency. Older pages (of which there are thousands) don't always fit with our latest standards so they must be updated in the process, which sometimes can lead to restructuring for readability, to make them more interesting, or to simply provide a clearer learning path making it easier for anyone to find the information they are looking for.

For the purpose of these, I'll explain a little bit about what was updated. Not that anyone is necessarily interested, but for those that are, I hope you enjoy.

Fonts for UMG
Entire section was updated with multiple re-rewrites of older content pages and breaking the page up to be more organize and easily accessible.

Landscape Sculpt Mode -
This was a monolithic page that has been reorganized and largely rewritten. The individual features of Sculpt mode have been broken off into their own pages to quickly reference the features and select the one you'd like to review.

Bloom
Added the Convolution for Bloom and cleaned up and added a Dirt Mask Best Practices.

Distance Fields - In the review process now and should be live in the near future!
Originally, Distance Field AO and RayTraced Shadows pages contained a lot of overlapping information. These have now been broken up to explain the Distance Fields Feature and then have the relevant information for each system. Also several how-to's covering each of the systems and some other uses for Distance Fields.

Overview

Distance Field Ambient Occlusion

RayTraced Distance Field Shadows

How-To's

Using DFAO and Settings

Using RTDF shadows and Settings

Using Distance Field Indirect Shadows

Setting up Particle Collision using Distance Fields

Vehicle User Guide
Reworked and rewrote this page to be a multi-step guide instead of a monolithic wall of text.

In-Progress:
These are pages that are currently being worked on in some manner. These are just a few that are in some form of completion in my queue.

Mesh Paint User Guide
This entire section has been cleaned up and rewritten in most cases since the UI has changed significantly with 4.16 and later versions. It's currently in the review process.

Auto Generating Lightmaps in UE4

Renderer Comparisons
This page will break down the Forward, Differed, and Mobile Forward/Differed Renderers and the features that they support along with a high-level overview of how each one works and when they should be used over another renderer.

Wishlist/Soonish Backlog:
These are some pages/sections that are currently in my own list of things I want to update or add to existing docs. Some are requests that will be on my in-progress list soon. There are other sections I've not listed here for my wishlist, but these are the bigger ones that I've thought about.

FBX Content Pipeline
This section needs to be more Artists-friendly and would benefit from restructuring how you find content for this section for Static and Skeletal Meshes.

Landscape Outdoor Terrain
Similar to the work done for the Landscape Sculpt mode should be done for the rest of this section. Lots of parts of this section should be cleaned up to quickly find the information you want.

Apologies for the lack of updates if anyone was continually monitoring. It's been a busy last 10 months!

My wife and I had a kid, so free time went out the door outside of work. The good news is that I've recently been moved over to our Learning Resources Team full-time so I get to work on learning content and documentation quite a bit!

Some of you who have followed my work on AnswerHub and the Forums may have noticed I started doing some of the Training Streams that are on Tuesdays @ 2 EST.

The first was on our Hierarchical Level of Detail (HLOD) system. You can hear me repeatedly fight with myself to not pronounce LOD incorrectly, at least by the majority consensus on it's pronunciation, anyway. :)

​https://youtu.be/WhcxGbKWdbI

Next up I did training stream on Lighting Techniques and Guides. It was some broad strokes overview of Lighting with UE4. I shot through a bunch of examples showing some things that maybe you are aware of or maybe not. I think it was a little bit for everyone kind of stream.

​https://youtu.be/jCsrWzt9F28

Anyway, it's been a busy time over the last number of months and I look forward to continuing to help people learn features in UE4, whether that's via Training Streams, Documentation, or here on my site when I get time.

Continuing with exploring some of the new rendering features in 4.11 this post covers the updates with Reflection Captures to add Capture Offset, a selected imported Cubemap for each reflection capture, and the ability to increase the resolution of reflections.